Science is one of the toughest subjects to get kids interested in, made more challenging by the relatively high cost of supplies. That’s where Labster comes in; gamifying the experience in digital labs, and imparting life skills along the way.

Julie: Welcome to the XR for
Learning Podcast. My name is Julie Smithson, and today I have Michael
Bodekaer Jensen from Labster. Michael is a tireless visionary and the
founder of multiple technology companies. Michael is also part of
Labster, a fast-moving, award-winning company that focuses on
revolutionizing the way science and lab safety is taught at
companies, universities, colleges and high schools all over the
world. The platform offers advanced virtual laboratory simulator,
where students and employees can work with real-life challenges in an
online environment that stimulates reality. Welcome, Michael.

Michael: Perfect. Thanks so
much, Julie, it’s an honor to be here. And thanks much for the great
intro. I think you’re covered perfectly many of the things that I was
hoping to say.

Julie: That’s awesome. Well,
please tell us a little bit more about Labster. I know that in
today’s world we’re looking for those accesses to education and
learning. And I’d love for you to share with us more about Labster
and what you offer.

Michael: The overall vision of
Labster is to empower the next generation of scientists to change the
world. We’re really of the strong belief that if we are going to
solve big global challenges — such as global warming — we need
thousands of young, bright minds working together and trying to solve
these important challenges. I think innovation always is, what we’ve
seen over and over again, the key driver for solving important,
critical global challenges.

So my co-founder myself started out
with this idea that, OK, as individuals, there’s no way we are going
to be able to solve these gigantic global challenges. But what if we
could inspire thousands of students to try? And not only try; also,
to believe in their own ability to solve these challenges and then
give them the skills, the concepts, the knowledge that they would
need to go out and solve these challenges. So that was sort of the
main motivation and driver, when we started business nine years ago,
and it still is today, really trying to understand this concept.
Also, it was driven a lot by us realizing the way science is taught
today. And my co-founder, he’s a science teacher as well. We found
that it was really hard to engage the students. It was often, as
science is seen as one of the most boring topics, and at the same
time, one of the most expensive topics to teach today. So it was mind
boggling for us to see that. And knowing how important science
education is for solving global challenges and for innovation, why
are we not really solving that? So we thought, OK, why don’t we try
and solve that? And I had some background as well in the gaming
industry. So we thought of, well, what if we just build, basically, a
flight simulator, but for science? Where we could create or use the
innovative gaming technologies and game designs, as well as learning
pedagogies, and try and create the most immersive, interactive
experience that you can imagine, to teach science in a much more fun
way? And then, how that would empower and inspire these students to
solve these challenges and believe in their own ability to solve
these global challenges, which they can. We often find the students
struggle with their own self-belief or confidence. And those were
some of the main things that we really wanted to tackle. So, yeah,
the very short pitch of what Labster is is essentially a flight
simulator, but for science.

And then there’s a lot more to it. We
have interactive animations that shows concepts. You can zoom in and
fly into cells and understand science on a molecular level as well.
And you can even explore Mars, or go on missions to see not just how
you can learn a topic, but also how you can apply that topic to solve
global important challenges, which is really important for student
motivation as well. So those concepts combined, and then we add in a
little bit of machine learning and A.I. to kind of optimize the
algorithm of helping the students learn through these simulations.
And then you have Labster. That’s sort of the very short pitch of a
very complex or great solution that we have today.

Julie: I think one of the things
that you did touch on was about the soft skills developments that
happen when you teach sciences. And just recently, I did a
presentation on how K-12, using augmented reality with sciences, will
help build those soft skillsets from the moment they jump into school
and build their knowledge and education in the world. And I think
sciences are so extremely important, more important than they get
credit for in the school system. I think that the soft skills of
collaboration, exploration, critical thinking, the what-if scenarios,
and the discovery that takes place in sciences is really the core
subject of STEAM, which a lot of education systems follow today. And
building those skillsets of soft skills using virtual and augmented
technologies, focused on sciences in these classes of chemistry and
biology, I think that it is a perfect way to introduce, really, a
saving grace of these soft skills in our next generation who
desperately need those to build on their own personal humanics and
become independent of their own thinking, in a world where we’re
dealing with robots and automation coming to replace these jobs.
Maybe you can speak to a little bit more on how you focus on these
soft skills within your programs.

Michael: Yes, it’s a really good
point that learning a lot of these soft skills through other topics,
such as the sciences, is a really powerful way for them to master
them as well. We actually care a lot about curiosity. So it’s in a
way not as directly a soft skill, but it’s an important
characteristic for students. And if we can inspire their curiosity,
it can drive a lot of the other learning that is critical for their
development. So we typically design our simulations — and in fact,
by the way, a simulator for us is typically something like a
25-minute minigame or simulation game where they go on a mission,
they talk to patients or to Martians or whoever — it might be
relevant for the topic they’re learning. And then they go through
that dialogue, understand a challenge. They get curious about how
they might be able to help these people by solving their challenges.
They go back to the laboratory and then they solve that. So through
each simulation, there’s always a narrative where they get to
interact with other players, develop that skill, collaborate with
other players within the simulations, and also try to really
structure their thinking. So they apply, for instance, more
self-reflection throughout the simulation. So we encourage the
students to really step up and reflect more on what did they just
experience. You know, why did they experience that and what did they
learn from that specific scenario? One interesting thing, as well,
you can do when you use virtual reality, or just virtual training in
general — it works, by the way, both in browsers and in virtual
reality, you can often get the same effects — but what you can do
there is actually, you can encourage failure. And that’s actually a
social skill or a sort of a skill for students that is really
important to learn. That they open themselves up to failing. Because
it’s really, truly through failure that you learn and understand
important concepts. And so we often work with teachers or professors
and experts to design learning experiences that are actually
encouraging failures, or failure-driven learning. And initially,
students may struggle, they may lose a little bit of their
self-confidence. They might find it hard. But by carefully designing
these faces of learning, we can actually boost the students
self-confidence through failure, celebrating those failures, and make
them see how each failure is actually a step forward for them in
their learning experience. So all these different skills, like
collaboration, learning, self-confidence in their learning ability,
and structuring their thinking as well as how do they approach a
problem and solving that for a specific topic is all concepts we
would design into each of these learning experiences.

Julie: And I think the… going
back to your background in gaming — and it’s been my belief that the
gamers will save the world, because I feel like they’ll be able to to
build out the branching narratives of analysis and build those
independent learning platforms and pathways and things like that for
students to engage in the content — and when it comes to winning or
failing, the games inspire them to engage even more. And I think
that’s where sciences/gaming/education come together to to engage the
students in a digital way.

Michael: Yeah, and it’s really
interesting to reflect on how much, I think, untapped potential we
still have within this space. Oftentimes… a few years back online
learning through video-based learning became very popular. But it’s
actually still a very passive way of learning. It’s a similar
challenge that you have as a classroom where as a teacher, I won’t be
able to personalize my learning or teaching to each individual
student. It becomes really difficult. But in the gaming industry,
they’ve worked for years and invested billions of dollars in
understanding how is it that individual players learn, stay
motivated, engage and how can we optimize the game play, basically,
such that we keep that engagement high, even through struggle, where
struggle sometimes is actually even good. And what we really do at
Labster is try to work with top leaning experts within game design,
as well as learning sciences and pedagogy, as well as then topic
experts, and breaching those three different, very different distinct
types of skillsets. We can create something truly magnificent, in
terms of learning experiences for these students that engages them. I
think you’re talked about something else as well, and I think a
really important topic here, is the role of the teacher in the
learning experiences that the students go through. It would be good
to also touch a little bit upon, because when we talk about these
simulations helping and guiding the students, we’re actually focusing
a lot more on how can we help the teachers — how can we empower the
teachers in the classroom — and help them engage their students in
the learning.

So as an example, where also data
analytics and big data becomes relevant in this, is that we provide
teachers, for instance, with a report. Typical use case of that would
be that the teacher asked their students to play a game as homework.
So OK, tonight, go home, play this game; rather than writing out a
report, you get to play a game, which most students really love — or
I should say, all. And then the teacher next morning gets a full
report saying, these are the areas where the student struggled the
most. This is where you can really drive and support your teaching to
your students and engage with them at their specific level. And we a
number of different research studies, absolutely astounding research,
learning outcomes; results actually doubling in the learning outcomes
when teachers applied this type of learning. A sort of data-driven
learning with the engaging part of the simulation. So I think there’s
so much potential still out there. We are even just, I feel,
scratching the surface of what we can do. And by continuing this
close collaboration with teachers, topic experts, learning sciences
experts, and game designers, and bringing all those worlds together,
we can truly transform education for the better.

Julie: And then the
collaboration of teachers globally, who are able to participate this
way and offer their skills and their knowledge to students around the
world, no matter where they are. And I know before we started
recording, we spoke about the opportunities in remote places where
they don’t have the experts or even, thinking about having access to
the knowledge base in their communities, isn’t there. And using this
technology, you’re able to reach those students. Curious to know
more. It’s actually one of the really big motivators and drivers for
me personally. The huge impact I see, and I realize more and more
every year that we can have in enabling and empowering teachers and
students around the world.

So I have a couple of really exciting
projects we’re working on is enabling, for instance, high school or
K-12 students in getting access to science at a level of quality, as
well as access simply to the laboratory training they need. Giving
them this access through virtual training has immense, huge
potential. So we worked with low-income schools across the U.S.,
worked with different partners. Often, actually, companies are
willing to support this through corporate social responsibility. And
they want to give back to the community, or even alumni of high
schools who want to give back to their high school, where we find
donors to fund the roll out of laptops to these schools. So where
they cannot afford a physical laboratory, or have very limited
access, is typically the challenge. We can now give these students
unlimited access with just a few laptops for each school. In Nigeria,
for instance, as an example, they have very limited access to
laboratory facilities, yet science skills could have such a profound
impact on the infrastructure and development of the countries. And so
there we have donors rolling out laptops across the country now
installing Labster as an alternative to the physical labs, and then
the limited capacity that you have them, after doing the virtual
training — just like a flight simulator training — you would go
into the limited physical lab facilities they have, and they can
reach far more impact with much, much less budgets.

And it applies to the whole world. We
work with the Danish government now, also, on rolling out this
technology across the country to more than 300,000 students as well
to really empower their students, because it’s not only the access to
the laboratories; the fact that we can create an environment in which
they can get more excited about science, they can learn through
failure and help them prepare and build up their confidence before
they go into the physical labs is a huge positive impact for the
students’ learning. It’s really exciting, these impacts. And then
maybe just to give a concrete number on what’s actually the impact
here, I mentioned that we see a 2X — a doubling — in the learning
outcomes in numerous different studies. And then we also see often
that the student engagement and learning, especially for
low-knowledge students, who would obviously often in the past,
struggled to keep up their engagement and self-confidence and
learning outcomes significantly increases, because they can go at
their own pace in these simulations. And ultimately what that means
is we had one case in the US — actually one of the top universities
— saw a decrease from dropout rates from 20 percent to 50– sorry,
to 5 percent. So a 15 percent drop in dropout rates, because suddenly
the students really understood. Not only did they understand the
science concept; they found it exciting.

The engagement piece, I think, is very
often under-appreciated. Just how important it is for us to engage
the students, make them excited about what they’re learning, and then
they will often find a way, then they will learn. But if we don’t
make it interesting for them, then the world they live in today,
where they’re bombarded with so many exciting, interesting things all
the time, if we can’t meet them at that level, then we won’t be able
to engage them in the learning. So, super excited about this.

And again, we’re just scratching the
surface, and in fact, we’d love to work with more partners from
around the world, and how we can roll out this technology as an
alternative to expensive physical labs, and really empower the
teachers and students in leveling up the science education to a whole
new level.

Julie: Well, I think that’s a
great way to end the podcast. Loving to learn. I think that’s one of
the biggest changes in our world today. And already, with the stats
that you just provided, you’re showing that engagement of students
who want to know more, and they’re not leaving school. And I think
that’s such a harsh reality that a lot of kids do not like school and
they do not love to learn. And we really need to change that. And I
think this technology is is how we’re going to do that.

Before we sign off. Michael, please
tell everybody how can they access Labster?

Michael: Yeah, so I mean, the
jump into www.Labster.com, and email me, Michael@Labster.com. Happy
to help. We didn’t even talk about the whole corporate training side.
We help large companies train their employees as well. And then
universities and high schools around the world. So, love to work with
anyone who sees potential in this.

Julie: Thank you so much,
Michael, for joining us today on the XR for Learning podcast.